Did Stop Signs Stop Investor Trading? Investor Attention and Liquidity in the Pink Sheets Tiers of the OTC Market John (Xuefeng) Jiang Associate Professor of Accounting Eli Broad College of Business Michigan State University
[email protected] Kathy R. Petroni Deloitte /Michael Licata Professor of Accounting Eli Broad College of Business Michigan State University
[email protected] Isabel Yanyan Wang Associate Professor of Accounting Eli Broad College of Business Michigan State University
[email protected] First Draft: June, 2011 Current Draft: January, 2012 We thank OTC Markets Group Inc. for generously providing us with data used in this study. We are especially grateful to Matt Fuchs and Steve Hock at OTC Markets Group for helping us understand the institutional features of the Pink Sheets markets through numerous email correspondence and phone conversations. We also thank Andrew Acito, Charlie Hadlock, Zoran Ivkovich, Stephannie Larocque, Jing Liu, Grace Pownall, Paul Tetlock, Xue Wang, workshop participants at Michigan State University, the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, and participants at the 2012 FARS midyear meeting for helpful comments. Did Stop Signs Stop Investor Trading? Investor Attention and Liquidity in the Pink Sheets Tiers of the OTC Market Abstract In 2007, OTC Markets Group assigned each Pink Sheets company to a public disclosure tier and affixed a colorful graphic to its stock symbol signifying the company’s tier. This natural experiment offers a unique setting to investigate if creation of these disclosure tiers and the associated colorful graphics grab investors’ attention, change investors’ trading behavior, and translate into changes in liquidity.